What Are Backlinks?

In the world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) backlinks are crucial.

Simply put – backlinks are links pointing to a website from another website. When any webpage on the internet links to another webpage on the internet a backlink is created.

There are many terms you may hear when researching backlinks and how to create backlinks.

Here is a short list of some of the terms associated with backlinks you may have heard of –

Link Juice –When a page on the web links to any of your websites articles or pages it passes something called ‘Link Juice’. Link juice helps your article or page rank higher in the search engines and also helps your domain gain trust with search engines such as Google.

No Follow Backlink – No Follow Backlinks do not contribute anything in the eyes of the search engines. Sometimes webmasters will add a No Follow tag when linking to other websites or pages they do not trust or they deem unreliable.

Do Follow Backlinks – All links added to website posts are Do Follow Backlinks. These are the links that actually pass the link juice on.

Internal Links –These are links you create within your website. Writing a post and then linking to another post or page on the same website is an internal link.

Anchor Text –Anchor text backlinks are superb when trying to rank for specific keywords or phrases.

The Advantages Of Backlinks For SEO Resons

The advantages of building High Quality Backlinks are enormous when taking SEO into consideration.

High Quality Backlinks send a huge signal to Google that a certain site is trustworthy and genuine and in turn Google rewards that site and shares it more with it’s readers = more traffic to your website.

The search engines rely on (what they call) spiders to crawl websites to determine it’s quality before it shares it with it’s readers. As the spiders can’t physically read what the text says on websites they have to rely on certain factors and backlinks are one of them. Websites with a good amount of high quality backlinks pointing to it will be easier for the spiders to pick out from the crowd. The backlinks will be a strong indicator to the spiders basically saying “look at all these websites linking to us, we’re a great website”

Should You Buy Backlinks?

Ok, So now you know the answer to your question of “what are backlinks and what are backlinks used for?” it’s time to decided if you should ever buy backlinks?

We can’t tell you whether or not you should go out and buy backlinks because that is your choice but here are a few things to consider before you buy backlinks.

Back in the day buying backlinks was the way to go. The worst sites imaginable could quite easily rank at the top of Google if the site creators had a large enough budget to but 1000’s upon 1000’s of backlinks.

It really didn’t matter what type of backlinks you were to buy back then as it seemed to be ‘Quantity Over Quality’ but not anymore!

You can instantly see why this doesn’t give everyone the same chance of ranking and Google quickly saw the problem with this.

Let’s say (back in the day) I had the greatest, best looking most informative website in a certain niche. This website took me 12 months of hard labour to create. I put my heart and sole into it yet my budget for buying backlinks was none existent, right?!

Along comes another guy. He too is in the same niche as me but his website offers next to nothing. He was able to throw his whole site together in a day. It’s poorly built and his website offers no value to anyone yet he has the money to buy backlinks by the 1000’s.

Do you think it fair that Google rewards him on his poorly constructed site and ranks him right at the top of the search engines and me right at the bottom even though my site offers so much more?

That’s right, it wasn’t fair and that why Google has rolled out an algorithm to prevent this happening anymore and that is known as The Penguin Algorithm.

The Penguin Algorithm was created and rolled out to crack down on websites that were trying to rank websites the Black-Hat way.

Websites that had unnatural backlinks, spammy backlinks or used any other method trying to manipulate Google got struck down.

Rankings to those websites dropped dramatically – to the point where some of the sites even fell off the search engines altogether. Other websites saw their traffic stop!

After reading that the choice is absolutely yours as to whether or not to buy backlinks as long as you’re aware that Google is constantly updating it’s Penguin Algorithm and if Google thinks for one minute that you’re involved in any sort of Black-Hat methods in regards to creating backlinks you will be punished!

Here’s what Matt Cutts has to say about low quality links –

What Makes A High Quality Backlink?

Simply put – a high quality backlink is a backlink which has been created to a relevant place on the web.

For an example we can say we own a website within the body building niche.

Now – if we go out and create backlinks from websites with a low domain authority, that is not considered a high quality backlink.

Also, as we’re in the body building niche (for this example) there would not be much sense in us going out and creating backlinks from websites in other niches like ‘make money online’ or ‘dog training’

If you were in the body building niche then you need to keep your backlinks relevant ie, create backlinks from other places within the body building niche, weight loss niche or maybe even the healthy eating niche.

Backlinks MUST be relevant.

How To Create Backlinks Of High Quality

Here are a few ways which you can implement to start building high quality backlinks –

Write Killer Articles – Content is (and always will be) king. Creating high quality articles with high engagement is a sure fire way to have other websites linking to yours. This is the best way (in our opinion) of creating high quality backlinks.

Commenting – Commenting on Do Follow forums. This should increase the number of backlinks and in turn should have you seeing an increase in traffic and rankings.

Social Networking – Social media is HUGE nowadays and if you’re not already using the power of social media in your business – you should start doing so immediately. Social media is a great place to build up your brand and reputation as well as picking up a number of high quality backlinks along the way.

Our Backlink Conclusion

That was our beginners guide to what are backlinks and building backlinks. We’ve covered a good amount of backlink topics here and we hope you now have a good understanding of the importance of backlinks and how backlinks can help you and your online business.

A solid backlink strategy is essential for search engine trust and ranking.

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